Remittances and morality: family obligations, development, and the ethical demands of migration

ABSTRACT

Remittances have moral dimensions that, albeit implicitly addressed in migration literature, have not yet been the focus of explicit attention and analysis by social scientists. Building on recent developments in the anthropology of ethics and morality, this article proposes theoretical and analytical pathways to address this important but often neglected aspect of remittances. It does so mainly via a critical analysis of existing scholarship on remittances, and ethnographic data drawn from research among Cuban migrants in Cuba and Spain. The reflexive scrutiny of scholars’ moral assumptions about remittances opens the way for the study of the moral dilemmas and ethical demands articulated by remittance senders and recipients. Family roles and obligations, and the uses of the money sent by migrants, are identified as key areas of moral difficulty. Their analysis shows how remittances inform moral reassessments of family relations, individual responsibility, economic practice, and development. The notion of ‘moral remittances’ is proposed as a heuristic comparative tool that serves to illuminate the moral aspects of remittances. This notion is put into perspective to complement and reconsider more metaphorical takes on remittances, notably the concept of ‘social remittances’, of which it helps reveal some epistemological limitations while opening future research avenues.

KEYWORDS:

• Remittances
• ethics and morality
• Cuban migration
• family obligations
• economic expectations
• development

Acknowledgements

We warmly thank Simoni’s Cuban research participants for their collaboration, Alessandro Monsutti, Elise Hjalmarson, and the participants in the 2019 Neuchâtel Graduate Conference of Migration and Mobility Studies, for their comments on earlier versions of this article. The article also benefitted from insightful remarks and suggestion by two anonymous reviewers, to whom we are very grateful. The Instituto Cubano de Antropología (ICAN) provided institutional affiliation for Simoni’s research in Cuba, and we acknowledge the assistance received.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The anthropological literature on ethics and morality has been gaining traction in the last couple of decades, notably following Laidlaw’s (2002) contribution. While the list is not exhaustive, we can mention here the recent monographs and edited volumes of Robbins (2004), Zigon (2008), Sykes (2009), Lambek (2010), Faubion (2011), Fassin (2012), Laidlaw (2014), Mattingly (2014), Keane (2015), and Lambek et al. (2015). Acknowledging the existence of different empirical foci, theoretical approaches and conceptual propositions (see Mattingly and Throop 2018 for a useful review), we draw mainly on the theoretical insights of Zigon (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010).

2 What must be retained in Mahmood’s reflection on habitus, which distinguishes it significantly from the more socio-economically determined version outlined by Bourdieu (1977), is that ‘it emphasizes the conscious and intentional work necessary to acquire a particular kind of habitus’ (Zigon 2010, 8 drawing on Mahmood 2005, 137–139). Both Mahmood and Zigon are influenced by a Foucauldian approach to ethics, and the recognition that people undertake conscious work on themselves ‘to become socially recognized moral persons’ (Zigon 2008, 45; see Foucault 1997).

3 By contrast, for Zigon ‘the study of the unreflective moral dispositions of everydayness is essentially what anthropologists have traditionally considered when studying embodied culture, tradition and power … studies [that] cannot be properly called an anthropology of moralities’ (2007, 140).

4 The findings presented here are therefore the result of a total of 24 months of ethnographic research based mainly on participant observation and on hundreds of informal conversations with a broad range of Cuban residents (mainly in Havana) and migrants (mainly in Barcelona). In spite of their diversity, research interlocutors are not representative of the Cuban resident nor migrant population, and there is a notable bias towards middle-aged Cuban men from relatively disadvantaged sectors of the population (see Simoni 2016a and 2016b for more details on field access and methods).

5 Cuba is considered a relative ‘latecomer to the group of remittance-receiving countries’ (Hansing and Hoffmann 2019), notably due to the vicissitudes of the relationship with its diaspora, particularly in the US – a relationships that has for a long time been curtailed by political tensions. The flow of remittances to Cuba has been growing steadily in the last decades, so much so that between 2008 and 2014 this Caribbean island recorded the highest rise in remittances for the whole of Latin America, going from 1’447 billion USD to 3’129 billion USD (Morales 2016), and further rising to over 3’575 billion USD in 2017 (Morales 2018). The dramatic economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuba’s key ally and partner, contributed to the Cuban authorities shifting attitude towards its diaspora, and the valuing of remittances as a welcome injection of hard currency into a struggling economy (Eckstein 2010b, 1050). Together with new US policies that further lifted restrictions on sending remittances to Cuba (ibid.), the country has now moved from a phase of relative exceptionalism to a new phase of ‘convergence with remittance patterns seen in other developing countries’ (Blue 2013, 45).

6 Anthropologists have uncovered the relations between morality and emotions, feelings and sentiments, showing the moral significance and appropriateness of particular emotions according to contexts (cf. Throop 2012; Cassaniti 2014). Throop (2012) also argues that ‘moral breakdowns’ are intertwined with, and sometimes produced by, emotions.

7 We use pseudonyms and alter certain details of research participants’ profiles to protect confidentiality.

8 Such calls for unconditional allegiance to one’s mother came up repeatedly in the course of Simoni’s field research, both in Cuba and among Cuban migrants in Spain, and find support in wider considerations on the enduring importance of matrifocal notions of kinship and family duty in Cuba (see in particular Safa 2005 and Härkonen 2015).

9 As argued by Parsons (2017) and Parsons, Lawreniuk, and Pilgrim (2014), these examples show that migration is best grasped as a multi-situated and multi-scalar phenomenon (notably the scales of sending and receiving places, and of migratory flows), which is shaped by multiple dimensions that add to the economic ones – and Parsons (2017) mentions for instance norms, symbolic meanings, power relations, social networks.

10 Examples could be multiplied here. See for instance Herrera (2017) on Ecuadorian migrant women in Spain and the United States and how remittances – via what we would refer as ethical work – come to be recognized as forms of care, or Pribilsky (2012) on Ecuadorian illegal migrant men in New York and the reconfiguration of their role as ‘good’ father and husband.

11 Recent studies of Cuban migration reflect on significant changes both in migratory legislation and Cubans’ mobility patterns, and how these intersect with further openings of the Cuban government to private enterprise and business endeavors (see Martín Fernández and Barcenas 2015; Aja Díaz et al. 2017; Krull and Stubbs 2018; Bastian 2018). This has generated some optimism among Cuban migrants in terms of circulating back and forth from Cuba, eventually returning more permanently, and setting up viable businesses in the country (see Simoni 2016b and Aja Díaz et al. 2017).

12 Such insights are premised on, and lend support to recognizing the social, cultural, and moral dimensions of economic life. This is something that, particularly since Polanyi’s (1971) work, continues to inform anthropological approaches to the economy (see Hann and Hart 2009 and Narotzky and Besnier 2014). Entanglements between economy and morality are explicitly addressed in the edited volumes of Parry and Bloch (1989), Humphrey and Mandel (2002), Browne and Milgram (2009), and Sykes (2009).

13 This is a risk that Thompson (1991) already identified in his reassessment of the notion of the moral economy. Having reviewed several uses of the concept following his original contribution, this author called for renewed attention to how ‘the two parts of the term’ (Thompson 1991, 345) – the ‘economy’ and the ‘moral’ – were constituted and conceived in a given research context (ibid.). Rather than following Fassin’s (2009) extension of Thompson’s (1971) original conceptualization to consider an ‘economy of morals’, for instance, we thus encourage scholars to adopt a narrower and more precise use along the lines suggested by Palomera and Vetta (2016) and in Simoni’s (2016b) analysis of ‘economization’ and ‘moralization’ processes.

14 Without using the notion of ‘remittances’, Gmelch (1980) already emphasised the impact of the returnees in their homeland in terms of input of skills, capital, ideas, structural changes and encouragement to migrate (1980, 146).

15 See Smith (2006) for a very interesting parallel in the case of Mexican New York residents on return visits to Mexico.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge the funding received from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT Post-Doctoral Grant SFRH/BPD/66483/2009), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF Ambizione Fellowship, PZ00P1 147946), and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 759649), which supported the research during the periods 2010–2014 (FCT) and 2014–2017 (SNSF), and since 2018 (ERC).